Day: February 6, 2018

In Hell, there is always room for one more.
Always.
Hell will take everyone – come one and come all.
It is Heaven that is exclusive.
Heaven as gated community, choosing only the best.
Ah, but who are the best?
Good question, no?
That part is a sliding scale that pushes the boundaries out, and out, and out so that Heaven is full of ghettos where ‘those’ people are.
The people who don’t follow X.
Hell, in accepting everyone, is not paradise, but it is reflectve of reality.
It is us.
The good, bad, and ugly.
Heaven is an ideal that no one can live up to.
It is the stick with which we push people.
It is the threat to make people behave and the promised treat at the end of a well lived life.
The living well again decided by us.
And I say all of this not as a criticism of religion or faith but as a way to change focus to us.
All of us.

As the needle moves culturally, as we wake up to the needs, hopes, fears, desires, and the overall experience of one another the plates we set our societies on shift. They must shift. We must grow, or we stagnate and the culture will die.
This isn’t about liberalism versus conservatism, this is about preservation.
We have cheated the system for far too long.
We have ignored the needs of too many people and we are paying that bill.
A bill that has been slowly doled out and we are finally looking at the total cst.

Pragmatically it makes no sense.
We need he full machine working in order to reach our potential.
What humanity has chosen to do is the equivelent of ignoring the use of your left hand and right foot as you move forward in life.
I get it, as a race, humans are territorial and as categorize.
With me or against me.
Lke me or different than me.
As advanced as we are, at our core, we are very tribal.
Very primal.

The seismic shifts that hit the culture start slowly, build, and last for years. Things will change, sometimes as a result of the shifts and sometimes in response.
Two steps forward, three back.

With each shift though you get those that are creating the shift and those that ‘wake’, who are newly aware at what is happening and who become akin to anyone that has found ‘god’ – they want everyone to find this new truth and by gumbo, you will!
And then there are those that refuse change.
Sometimes because they don’t see a need for change.
Somtimes because they don’t want the change.
Sometimes just because they don’t want to be told what to believe.

We are in a culture that has become choked with the invasive species we call ‘trolls’, who are people who have their beliefs and what they follow but who want nothing more than to disrupt things. Some do this to further their agenda but many do it just to be agents of chaos. They don’t care which way the wind blows, they just want to light the fire that burns the brightest.
The problem with these trolls is that they incite, inspire, and drive those that may not be passionate about a social issue to take not just a side but a stance, planting their feet firmly nd refusing to move.
It isn’t that these people are, say, racist, but that they don’t want to be told what to do, believe, or champion.
They don’t want to feel that they are being marginalized in order to raise someone up to a level they should already be at.
They don’t want to lose their standing.
Ah, and there is the heart of it, the foundation upon which our gates and walls are built – fear.
We don’t want to lose what we have, and even if we want to see others find their own happiness we are not willing to risk our own for that to happen.
A problem there, a fallacy is that discomfort and loss are synomous.
That they are the same.
Change brings discomfort.
It has to.
But that does not mean that you will lose what you have, not fully.
The goal culturally, should be that we are all on as close to equally footing as possible, and until that happens some people will get the spotlight until that can happen. That doesn’t mean they are better or more deserving but that they never had the same opportunities as, say, me. I got lucky in who I was born to, where Iwas born, and to the lifestyle I was born into.
Not everyone gets that.
Some get better.
Some worse.
Some much, much worse.
This isn’t about what is ‘fair’, it is about what is right.
So we work to make sure that people feel as if their face, their voice, their PERSON matters as much as I do, you do, and as anyone else. This isn’t about taking away your history and heritage but reconizing that other heritages are just as important and celebrating them.

But it is hard to change.
You can’t just be told to ‘wake’ and you are woke.
AWAKEN!
It doesn’t work that way.
At all.
Change happens when you are open to it or are forced to do it and social change that is forced isn’t going to lead us forward – it will hold us back.
While we need to force some change, we have to, when it comes to the changing of a heart, that has to happen at street level.
That has to be earned.
And it won’t be easy.
You don’t come by distrust, unease, and hate easily. You make the choice to head down those paths and then you work to make sure that your belief rings true in everything you do.
If you shake our beliefs then you shake who we are and what drives us.
So in changing a heart you have to understand that the only way it will change is when they see you as not just a checked box but as a person who they connect with.

Which isn’t to say that we should give racists and Nazis a hug because they are just misunderstood.
No.
It is to say that people can change, but it won’t happen behind a keyboard or sign.
It has to happen as we come to one another as people.
But man, those walls.
The walls we build between one another.
And the thing here, the awful thing, is that we help one another build these walls just as we build those ghettos in Heaven.
By pointing our fingers at one another and telling each other that we are monsters, racists, bigots, sexist, liberal, snowflake, and a dozen other things. We lead with an accusation before anything else.
With me or against me.
We rarely work to find the commonality.
And it is hard.
It is hard to find it when you start out with the worst of someone, or your perceived worst of them.
But the thing is this – we are all here right here, right now, and we all need this earth in order to survive. You can tell me about the afterlife all you want but if this life was so worthless to our deities then why would be here at all?
This place matters.
This life matters.
WE matter.
Take away the people who want to see the world burn – and they stand on both sides of the wall – and you just have people looking for answers and connections.
You have people who may have strong beliefs but who also have dreams and fears like you do.
You find hope.
Because so long as we can connect, there is hope.
Hope or something better.
Because most of us want to live.
And in order to live we need one another.
There is no choice.
Heaven and Hell, what we consistently miss, is that they are just different views on the same place.
One person’s Hell is another’s Heaven.
Vice Verse.
The moment we stop pushing people into the boxes we feel they belong and let them choose where they belong then the moment we can choose our own place arrives.
We hold ourselves back with our hate and eliminate half of the flavors and colors of the spectrum. We don’t have to understand why people make the choices they do but we have to accept them unless we want strangers telling us what choices WE need to make.

There will never not be room in Hell.
Never.
Because Hell wants everyone.
Makes you wonder why we don’t want our Heaven, or our earth to be the same way.

Master of Scaremonies

Chris Ringler is an author, blogger, artist, and creator of odd events living in Flint, Michigan. He began writing as a teenager and has received two honorable mentions in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, has been featured in BareBone, Horrible Disasters, Horror Addicts Guide to Life,and Cthulhu Sex Magazine, and won Best In Blood on HorrorAddicts.com.

Look to the sky, find the darkest point, and that my friends is where you can find him…when he isn’t dropping beats with mermen.